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  “How do you know that?” Rob asked.

  “He’s the only other fleet vet with this mob. Who else am I going to swap stories with?” Meltzer eyed Geary. “I heard there’s another ship in-system. We’re dealing with a Bucket?”

  “Yes. Let’s you and me and Torres get together and brainstorm this.”

  “Corbin isn’t going to want to play.”

  Rob exhaled slowly. “Tell Corbin he either meets with me and you in the break room on the third deck in ten minutes, or the police will show up in fifteen minutes and drag him there.”

  “We’re not being recalled, are we?” Meltzer asked. “Because I wouldn’t like that, either.”

  “No one is being recalled. But the council, and all the other people with us, need you and me and Torres to figure out if there’s anything we can do about that Bucket. If you and Torres want to go walkabout after we’ve hashed over the problem, I won’t try to stop you.”

  Fourteen minutes later, as Rob was getting ready to call the council, Torres shuffled into the break room and sat down heavily in the seat next to Meltzer. In a colony group made up primarily of young people looking for a start in life and middle-aged people seeking a new start, Torres stood out for being older, his face bearing the lines of experience and the resentment of someone who thought life had not dealt out the rewards expected for a long life of work.

  Acutely aware that his authority over Torres was limited, Rob tried not to talk like the lieutenant he had been. “You two know the problem, right? And you both appear to know more than I do about Buckets. What can we offer the council as alternatives to surrendering and paying the protection money being demanded?”

  Ninja made a face. “If they haven’t upgraded their systems, they’re probably still running on HEJU.”

  Corbin shook his head, speaking grudgingly. “Unless they gutted the systems, they’re still using HEJU. Those things were designed around the operating system. That’s why everybody sold their Buckets instead of upgrading them.”

  “HEJU,” Rob commented. “Is that the one where you have to input commands backward?”

  “Yeah,” Ninja said, smiling.

  “No,” Torres insisted. “HEJU is designed to make you think through the entire process and your end goal before starting, so you have to enter command sequences in the reverse order you want them executed.”

  “Same thing,” Ninja said. “That means their firewalls must be extremely obsolete. No one has coded in HEJU for at least twenty years, so there couldn’t have been any upgrades in ages.”

  “The crew codes HEJU,” Torres corrected again. “They have to. The operating system needs patches and repairs. But they’re probably not any good at it, just stuff they learned on the job, so the patches and repairs are probably just able to get by.”

  “Do you think there’s any way we can deal with that Bucket?” Rob asked him.

  Torres paused, eyeing Rob as if trying to judge the sincerity of his outward respect for the former sailor’s knowledge. “If we had anything better, and just about anything would be better, that Bucket would be toast. Even an old Sword Class destroyer could take it without breaking a sweat. But this old tub,” he said as he kicked the deck of the Wingnut with his heel, “is useless. They didn’t bring any weapons?” he demanded.

  Rob shook his head. “No. Just hand weapons.”

  “Then you got a boarding party. That’s something.”

  “A boarding party?” Ninja laughed. “Like some old pirate vid? We swing across to the Bucket with knives in our teeth? How do we get them to open a hatch for us?”

  “Can’t you do that, Ninja?” Rob asked her.

  She paused to think. “You mean hack their systems? I don’t know. If we had some stuff on HEJU aboard—”

  Rob held up his pad. “I just checked. We do. In the colony library.”

  “Cool. Yeah, I can hack them. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Can you disable their weapons?”

  “Permanently?” Ninja frowned in thought.

  Torres shook his head. “HEJU is an obsolete and gnarly system, but it’s easy to patch. That’s its only good feature. No matter how you hacked the weapons, they could do a work-around if they had time.”

  Ninja raised one eyebrow at Rob. “I could try to jinx the power core. Cause an overload. They wouldn’t have time to patch that.”

  “An overload?” That would certainly solve the problem of the Bucket. But . . . “How many people do they have aboard? The database says standard crew size is twenty-four.”

  “You can run it long term with six, as long as nothing big breaks,” Torres said. “It’d be hard to handle a battle with that few, though. Or pack in as many as forty. What’s the matter, Ninja? Don’t want to have that many lives on your conscience? Don’t worry. They’re all just apes like us. Nobody important.”

  “Shut up, Corb,” Ninja told him.

  “I don’t think we should blow it up,” Rob said, trying to think beyond an immediate solution. One of the things that had frustrated him back on Alfar was the attitude that short-term solutions were fine because in the long term someone else would have to deal with the problem. “That would work for an immediate solution. But it would leave us without any defense against the next predator who showed up. If we could capture it—”

  Torres glowered at Rob. “Don’t even think about drafting me to help operate it!”

  “I wasn’t,” Rob said, letting his voice grow cold and sharp. “I’d think you’d be interested in the idea of setting yourself up as a private contractor to help maintain the thing for the colony. Ninja, can you hack the systems on the Bucket to drop their shields and open a hatch? Without the Bucket’s crew knowing right away, so they wouldn’t try to override your hack?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That should be doable. You’re seriously thinking about a boarding operation? Does anybody with us know how to do that? And, just for the record, I don’t.”

  Rob didn’t bother asking Torres. “I went through a couple of drills. That’s it. But it sounds like those are our two options. Either try to remotely override the controls on the Bucket’s power core so it blows up or try to capture it.”

  “Or pay the money,” Torres said.

  “Yeah. Three options. Thank you,” he said to both Ninja and Torres. “I’ll let the council know and see what they say.” He paused, once again having to focus on the fact that he could not give either Ninja or Corbin Torres orders. “Please stay where I can get in contact with you again quickly if the council has more questions.”

  The council was still in session when Rob returned to brief them. They didn’t bother hiding their lack of enthusiasm for either of the options. “There has to be something else we can do,” Council Member Odom insisted.

  “You asked me to look at military options,” Rob said, trying to keep his voice level. “That’s what I did, along with Lyn Meltzer and Corbin Torres.”

  “Why can’t your IT person shut down everything else on the cutter except the power core?” Council President Chisholm asked. “Then they wouldn’t be a threat.”

  Rob used his hands to illustrate the movement of ships as he spoke. “We could try that. Two things might happen. One is that the Bucket crew figures out how to get their systems working again, patches the damage done by Ninja, and comes back at us. Torres says they should be able to patch anything Ninja does if given enough time. The other thing that might happen is that the Bucket crew can’t fix it, and their ship doesn’t brake velocity before they reach us, instead being stuck on the same vector as they race past this planet and the star and onward out into the dark between stars, where they would slowly starve to death.”

  Council Member Kim smiled derisively. “Not a humane alternative, then?”

  “The closest we have to a sure thing,” Rob said, “is to task Ninja with trying to ge
t the Bucket to blow up.”

  “But can she do that?” Chisholm asked. “I’ve met my share of programmers who say they can do what I need and end up delivering something far short of that.”

  “Ninja got asked to leave Alfar’s fleet because she was too good at breaking and entering,” Rob said. “I reviewed her case when she was getting pushed out. That’s how we met back at Alfar. She got her nickname both because her code is so hard to spot that it can get into anywhere and because she never left footprints firm enough for anyone to nail her afterward. The service could never get enough evidence to charge her with anything, so finally they just pushed her out. If anyone can do it, Ninja can. But she hasn’t promised she can do it. She needs to brush up on the programming language used on a Bucket, then probe their systems from long range to see what can be done.”

  “Then how can we know that she can support that other alternative, capturing the ship?” Odom complained.

  “Supporting a boarding operation should be simpler,” Rob said. “Power cores have a lot more safety interlocks built in. You’ve asked me for advice, so I think we should try to capture that Bucket and use it to defend this star system until we can get something better. I’m putting my money where my mouth is on this because I know I would have to lead any boarding effort. I’m the only one with our colony who knows anything about how to do it.”

  A long moment passed while the members of the council exchanged wordless glances. One finally spoke up. “There’s a fourth option. Leave. If Scatha plans to prey on whoever occupies this star system—”

  A furious eruption of voices drowned out the speaker.

  “This star system is ours,” Council President Chisholm said after she managed to silence the uproar. “We will not cut and run, leaving it to anyone who threatens us. So, Rob, you and this Ninja and Corbin Torres would be part of this boarding effort—”

  “No,” Rob said, shaking his head. “Ninja will be doing her thing aboard the Wingnut. Torres has no interest in participating and no training in that area. He’s also not a young man, and a boarding operation can be extremely stressful physically. I was hoping the police force could assist.”

  “We’d have to ask for volunteers,” another council member advised. “The contracts for the police force do not include this kind of thing. We have no authority to demand that they take part.”

  “We could ask for volunteers from everyone,” Kim argued. “How many do you need?”

  “Twenty,” Rob said. “I’d only have three days to train them.”

  “Why are we even discussing this?” Odom said. “We don’t have the means to take over that ship.”

  “Then I have to recommend that we try to blow it up,” Rob said.

  “We can’t just decide to blow up another ship!” one of the members down on the planet protested.

  “Self-defense,” another chimed in.

  Chisholm halted the babble of cross talk that followed. “We’ll research this and consult with our legal team. We have almost three and a half days to make this decision and ensure that it is legally justifiable.”

  “Excuse me,” Council Member Leigh Camagan said. Short in stature but with intense eyes, her two words commanded everyone’s attention. “What happens if we can’t blow it up? Physically cannot. Citizen Geary said that is a possibility. If all we do is prepare for causing that ship’s power core to overload, and we find out it cannot be done, we will have no alternative but to pay the extortion.”

  Silence fell until Council President Chisholm spoke again. “What do you suggest, Leigh?”

  “Prepare for all possibilities, not just the one we prefer. Have Mr. Geary recruit some volunteers and train them. If we don’t need them, we haven’t lost anything. But at least we might have another option if the power core overload does not work.”

  Kim nodded. “I think Council Member Camagan is right.”

  The vote went in favor of pursuing both plans.

  “Mr. Geary needs some authority if he’s going to do his part,” Leigh Camagan pointed out.

  Another vote was taken, and Rob Geary, formerly a lieutenant in the small space force of the Old Colony Alfar Star System, found himself temporarily a lieutenant once more.

  “Really?” Ninja asked once he had found her again. “A temporary lieutenant in what?”

  “The otherwise nonexistent defense forces of this star system,” Rob said.

  “So you’re, like, the most senior officer, and the most junior officer, and you’ve got no enlisted? Who’s going to do all the work?”

  “Are you interested?”

  “No way.”

  “I do have a budget, so there’s money in it for you,” Rob pointed out. “And a challenge to your skills.”

  “The money is enough,” Ninja assured him, “if it’s enough money.”

  It was.

  He was pleasantly surprised when ten of the twenty-officer police force volunteered for the possible boarding operation. Those ten contacted friends who they thought might be interested, and in short order, Rob had the twenty volunteers he needed.

  “I also need battle armor and military-grade weapons,” he commented to his new second-in-command.

  Val Tanaka was a police veteran of the tough district around the largest spaceport on the surface of Alfar’s primary world. She was at least ten years older than Rob, one of the middle-aged types looking for a change. Rob had met her once on Alfar while bailing some of his sailors out of jail after their night on the town had gotten seriously out of hand. “What you’ve got are survival suits and nonlethal shockers,” Val commented. “Why exactly don’t we have any lethal weaponry?”

  “Because we wouldn’t need lethal weaponry,” Rob explained. “Or so they told me. Because we’d all get along, and everyone else would leave us alone because it’s such a big universe.”

  “Did they ask anybody who actually lives in this universe whether that made sense?”

  Rob shrugged. “It came down to money. They had other things that were regarded as higher priorities.”

  “Sure,” Val said. “I bet they found enough money for insurance, though, didn’t they?”

  “You’re right. Investing in some military forces would have been another form of insurance. But what would they buy? A full-on space combatant like that Bucket? Aerospace craft for defending a planet? Ground forces? Get them all, and that’s really expensive for a new colony that has a lot of other things they need to spend money on.” Rob gestured toward the outside of the Wingnut, where infinite space held uncounted stars. “But the main reason is because they’re still thinking in Old Colony, pre–jump drive terms. Space is too big, so aggression between star systems is too hard, and even minimal defenses will prevent anyone’s being tempted. And if anybody does try anything serious, Old Earth will jump in and put things right. The jump drive changed all that, but the jump drive is too recent, less than a couple of decades old, so a lot of decision makers are still caught in the past. Trips that required years between neighboring stars now only take a week or two. The same thing that made it affordable for us to plant this colony makes it profitable for somebody on Scatha to shake us down using an old warship.”

  “And because we can go so much farther, Old Earth is a long, long ways off. So what’s our plan?” Val asked.

  “We act pretty much helpless.”

  “We are pretty much helpless.”

  Rob grinned. “Then that ought to make our act believable, right?”

  • • •

  Space might have become much smaller in terms of human ability to travel between stars, but when floating in endless space, gazing at countless stars, it still felt very much like infinity. It was strange, Rob thought, that the human mind could not really grasp forever, but human emotions could feel it. Infinity felt cold and uncaring, too vast to even notice the insignificant gaze of humans, but al
so almost unbearably magnificent and beautiful, because humans were a part of all that and could sometimes sense a connection to something immensely greater than themselves. Perhaps that was just an illusion, but it felt real.

  Drifting weightless and gazing on the universe from outside the protective shell of a ship or a world was humbling, Rob decided, no matter what other emotional responses it triggered.

  Also humbling was trying to figure out the “intuitive” maneuvering controls for a thrust pack whose customer service was light years away. Instead of working pointer style, where you pointed one hand toward your objective and the thrust pack calculated and triggered the necessary push to get there, it used a look-style system, where you looked at your objective and the thrust pack used that input. But it was too sensitive, reacting to every twitch, which meant that every time Rob’s eyes wandered even a little, the thrust pack took that as a new input command and adjusted its push. The constant small jolts and jerks were not only incredibly irritating, they also burned up energy at a ridiculous rate. His attempts to scroll through menus to change the sensitivity settings kept running into the software equivalent of blind alleys and bottomless pits.

  It reminded him all too much of the reasons he had been happy to leave the small fleet that Alfar had maintained. Getting anything done had been almost impossible, and by the time he’d actually achieved something or gotten somewhere, he had a hard time remembering why he had wanted to go there in the first place.

  But that in turn reminded him of one of his failures that had particular relevance right now. The one time he had actually led a boarding party in a drill, he had totally failed. The memory of that still stung, and added to that now was guilt that he hadn’t mentioned it to the council.

  Rob finally got the target positioned about half a kilometer out from the Wingnut. The target was simply a large panel with tethers on the corners to keep it from drifting away from the ship. He double-checked the data on the movement of the warship from Scatha that he had entered into his survival suit’s very limited heads-up display, making sure that the bulk of the Wingnut blocked any view of what was happening here from where the Bucket was currently located. The Bucket was still a couple of light hours away, about two billion kilometers, but even the obsolete sensors on the old warship shouldn’t have any trouble seeing clearly across such a distance, and the last thing Rob wanted was for the crew of the Bucket to see people near the Wingnut apparently practicing jumping from one ship to another.